Liberty Street Economics

Liberty Street Economics is the public-facing research publication of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, staffed by economists working across the Bank's research divisions. On 14 April 2026 it published the Survey of Consumer Expectations (SCE) workplace AI findings from the November 2025 survey wave, covering AI tool adoption rates, income stratification of AI access, and workers' forward-looking unemployment expectations. The timing was not incidental: the Bureau of Labor Statistics had been scheduled to publish a dedicated GenAI workplace report the same day and did not. Liberty Street's SCE findings became the de facto federal measure of AI's workforce impact.

Liberty Street Economics publishes short, accessible research notes on monetary policy, financial stability, labour markets, and banking. It is not a peer-reviewed journal but carries the NY Fed's institutional authority and is widely cited in financial and policy media. The April 2026 AI publication was notable in scale: key findings included 39% of employed workers using AI, 62% expecting AI to raise unemployment within 12 months, and access stratified 4.2 times by income. These numbers were derived from a consumer household survey, which measures expectations and self-reported behaviour rather than employer-side establishment data — a methodological caveat that matters when Congress is legislating.

Liberty Street's publication arrived on the same day as the BLS absence, making it the primary federal data reference for journalists, senators, and policymakers debating AI workforce policy in April 2026. Its position as the source of the 62% unemployment-expectation figure gives it outsized influence on this beat for as long as BLS does not publish a competing establishment-side number.